The Illustrated Man Literary Elements

Science fiction, fantasy, short stories

The context for the stories, the grand narrative of the "Illustrated Man," takes place somewhere in America during the early mid-twentieth century. The other stories, however, take place in a variety of places and times, ranging from the far distant future on Mars to Mexico in 1938.

There are few details about the narrator in the introduction other than the fact that he is on a two-week walking tour of Wisconsin, and that his visions of the Illustrated Man's tattoos are the basis of the other stories. The various stories in the collection are mostly from a third-person point of view, although there are one or two notable exceptions.

Contemplative, imaginative, occasionally critical

Protagonist: the narrator, who views the stories etched onto the Illustrated Man's back. Antagonist: the fears and terrors inscribed on the Illustrated Man's body, which warn against terrible futures and predict the narrator's own death.

The specific conflicts vary by story, but the grand conflict of the overarching narrative is the narrator's peril at the hands of the Illustrated Man, whose tattoos predict his murder of the narrator.

The narrator sees, in the Illustrated Man's tattoos, a prophetic image of the Illustrated Man strangling him to death. He jumps up and runs toward the nearby town, and the ending is implied.

When the narrator invites the Illustrated Man to sit down, the Illustrated Man says, "You'll be sorry you asked me to stay. Everyone always is" (2). This ominous statement foreshadows the narrator's terror and death at the hands of the Illustrated Man implied at the end of the novel.

"Hollis looked down and his left hand was gone. Blood spurted." ("Kaleidoscope," 2)

"The Exiles" alludes to the writings of many famous writers of horror, using several of them as characters who inhabit Mars. Writers referenced include Edgar Allen Poe, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Henry James, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, Lewis Carroll, Algernon Blackwood, L. Frank Baum, H.P. Lovecraft, Aldous Huxley, and William Shakespeare.

Materialism Imagery: In "The Concrete Mixer," a Martian named Ettil Vrye is forced to go to Earth as part of the invasion force. While he is there, he notices the humans' obsession with material goods and consumerist items. This obsession is evident throughout the story in the language Bradbury uses to describe the culture of Earth: Ettil walks by beauty shops, movie cameras, and many other images of consumerist culture that horrify him with their insipidity.

In "No Particular Night or Morning," Hitchcock adopts a philosophy of solipsism, which involves skepticism of everything he cannot physically see, feel, and experience. Solipsism, however, requires belief in the fact of one's own existence and only one's own existence, which is a philosophical premise that is impossible to see, feel, and experience, so solipsism is inherently paradoxical.

The innocent levity with which the parents in "The Veldt" treat the affairs of their children, blinding them to the horrifyingly serious actuality of the situation, parallels that of the parents in "Zero Hour," who think their children's stories are only part of a game, when in reality they signal an actual invasion of Earth.

"...like scattered rubies and emeralds, with Rouault colors and Picasso colors and the long, pressed-out El Greco bodies." (Prologue, 4)

"The first Illustration quivered and came to life..." (Prologue, 6)